The Prince's Pen

by Horatio Clare

  The conscripts in that convoy never would have had a prayer had not Ludo’s policy been to spare as many as possible. A mine killed the first vehicle, my mortars got the last, and Freddie the Lingos was on the horn, telling them to throw down everything if they wanted to see their mothers again. Ten seconds was all we ever gave them and usually more than they needed. We were always fewer than we seemed, so if they fought we had to get very close and kill them quickly then, or all hell...

  I preferred it when they were Chinese or Koreans. I know it’s stupid. But if you’ve got to shank someone’s innards out with a bayonet it’s preferable he or she doesn’t look too much like anyone in your family, and it’s better you don’t understand what they’re screaming. Because anyone surrendering when his oppo decided to fight would be unlucky, we developed the All-For-One. They all gave up or they all died: that was Freddie’s constant message and it didn’t matter where they came from (the Invaders had many auxiliaries, pressed and mercenary): those who served their tours in old Britain soon knew the rule of All-For-One. The Invaders’ answer to it was to court marshall anyone who came back from a fight without his weapon. The conscripts’ solution, in turn, was to desert. Some headed for the towns and scrounged, other bands of them lived rough, preying on sheep and freezing. The farmers didn’t like that but they knew free labour when they saw it.

  We took their guns, set them to run down the valley, torched what we couldn’t carry and were gone, a file of foot-knights vanishing into the black. We used to wrap ourselves in silver bags like they give victims of hypothermia – Mylar, wonderful stuff. In the beginning the drones still saw with thermal cameras; mummied up in the bags we showed no heat. Later they sent smaller, clever drones in swarms, and those things listened. They could hear your heart beat. They were terrible. It was one of them got Ninnian, Ludo’s youngest brother. There weren’t even bits to bury. A funeral in those days was a circle of us trying not to look over our shoulders, with a bit of a bag in a hole if you were lucky, and all of us crying as the bag leaked red.

  Well, that ambush was near the beginning of the war. Before we knew how wars go, the beginning was – awful to think – but it was a heady time. A time to be alive! ‘Peacekeeping’, they called it, as they bombed us, shelled us, rocketed us, mined us – and for every fighter they killed twelve innocents. The old UN was their beaten dog and in the name of something called ‘International Opinion’ it was decreed that invisible things called ‘the Worldwide Financial System’ and ‘the Stability of the ICU’ required the ‘emergency development’ of ‘failed states’ – it was all dressed up marvellous in fancy language.

  We scorned them.

  ‘Cheeky buggers!’ Ludo was quoted as saying. ‘There’s nothing failed about this state. We know what they want. They can well afford our water-prices but they’re fixing for smash and grab.’

  All sorts of people streamed to us. Ludo ordered a welcome in the hillsides for Moroccans, French, Romanians, Touaregs, Libyans, English, Italians, you name it – mostly their young, their passionate and of course their Believers came. The Invaders hated the Believers, called them the Poison of Democracy, said they raised havoc wherever they went. We took the opposite view: believe what you want. Until the peace Ludo never really troubled over anyone else’s faith – but I’m running ahead again. The fact was, anyone who didn’t fancy being chipped and coded came west and we took them in. Many became our recruits. It wasn’t the first time, as the scholars pointed out. Didn’t the old Blue People hide here from the Romans, and fight a twenty-five-year guerrilla war against them?

  The European Government could see the way it was going to go but they were petrified by implications. They sent Ludo ambassadors, offering all sorts of amnesties and absolutions if he would only fall into line: as well as the Believers, the Invaders were now using Ludo as their primary excuse.

  ‘If you won’t stand up I can’t back you,’ was Ludo’s reply, accompanied by whispered advice to appoint him Defence Minister of the Union as quickly as possible. But of course they didn’t and that was that. Space-based missile systems, bach! Motions, votes and resolutions come up rather short against them. The ships and planes, the armour and the guns of old Europe were specked to hot scrap in a day. The European Governing Council never quite got round to giving the order to fire back.

  We were ‘fundamentalists’, because some of us still believed in God. We were ‘hill-niggers’; we were ‘two-pound Taliban’ because if you fought for Ludo he paid you enough for a fish supper. And they installed an Interim Government of sell-outs and blacklegs, people who took baths in all the ICUs they shipped in, wrapped in polythene: great slabs of coloured paper which were supposed to make us forget the centuries we had lived as free people. And they arranged ‘elections’ in which you could vote for this stooge or that traitor, and why wouldn’t we accept it? And they put out ‘Wanted’ lists and offered fortunes to anyone who would turn us in. And they hunted us like rats.

  But rats is hard killing, especially when they wise up to the traps. First we got rid of phones and computers, then the radios, then pretty well everything with a battery. We co-ordinated our fight through boys on scrambling bikes carrying hand-written notes. As you can imagine, that called for a pretty high degree of devolution among the different commanders, but it worked well. Busy times! It didn’t take long for the Invaders to identify my script.

  ‘Look Clip! They want you almost as much as me!’ Ludo said. ‘For that much it’s worth turning yourself in!’

  A million ICUs on your head don’t make for the softest pillow, but then pillows weren’t much of our equipment. We moved fast and light, from hillside caves to hedges, ditches, woods and old mine­shafts. We spent five months underground once, near Blaen­avon. There’s little enough to recommend the troglodyte life except it’s harder for the drones to follow you. The ones the size of tea cups with just enough explosive to jelly a roomful of you; thermo­baric warheads: a curse on whoever came up with them. They killed our families, our friends, our children – shot, bombed and blasted. We wept rage but we wouldn’t quit. And we had our revenges too. Blew up the puppet governor of Glamorgan, and Crian sniped the collaborator finance minister – the best shot fired in Wales since the invention of gunpowder... bless that girl, she was a genius with a rifle.

  Pick of the pops, we brought down that heli­copter with two members of their Praesidium inside, on their way to what they thought was a secret council inside Cardiff Castle. Nothing the Tourist Board could say would persuade their top nobs to visit Wales after that. Half the old British Army had done their training on our hills so many who joined us knew the ground we fought on. And what a grand country is Wales for guerilla war! Dimpled and rippled with ruins and wrinkles, furrowed with stream-cuts, rumpled with folded hills. Show me any view in Wales and I’ll show you double a dozen pockets where you can hide a platoon.

  And we – I – read all the classic texts. Castro, Trotsky, Che, Ho Chi Minh. There’s enough ammo on half a library shelf to bring down any tyrant – remember that, though I hope you never need it. Do you still have libraries, I wonder? Or books, even? Hang on to whatever’s left, is my advice. Screens are all very fine (if you don’t mind them knowing what you read, controlling what you can get and knowing when and where you read it) but they would have been death to us. I read all those histories to Ludo while he got on with directing his own version. People said he was the heir to Glyndwr and Llewellyn but he was more successful than either of them.

  The second year of the war was vicious and the third turned even worse. Llandovery was a marvellous piece of organisation. March, and a bitter one, another no-moon night. (We recruited the silver girl as a terror weapon – those poor conscripts. Monthly, when she looked away, they knew we’d come for them somewhere.) Thirty of us moved into Llandovery and went door to door. We’d indentified certain competent people in the town who could be roused and then set to rouse others, according to a list. Once out of their houses the population
was directed along a certain road, up a hill and into a wood. (It took an hour longer than I had planned because of the dogs, cats, rabbits and bloody budgies. People said they would either bring the pets or stay home with them, so the budgies came too.)

  Just before the light, ten miles away, a team set off the charges in the wall of the dam of Llyn Brianne. Waters that had been penned a hundred storeys high ran wild again, for the first time since the dam was built back in 1972. God, the noise! I thought they had overcooked it and blown the lid off hell. And then there was a thing like a silver-black dragon, exploding elemental out of the valley. Torrents came down like God’s vast vengeance and that was the end of the garrison, and the better part of Llandovery.

  We’d stuffed the wood with stores, tents, cooking equipment, fuel and sleeping bags. We apologised for wrecking the homes, schools and shops which the waters had washed away and promised fulsome compensation for the whole town when the war was over.

  ‘And when’s that going to be?’ they cried.

  ‘Much sooner than you think, friends,’ we said.

  When frowning dawn came up on the Towy valley five hundred young men and women were rolling over the flooded meadows with their uniforms painted in red mud and eyes that did not blink the rain. The old crows were bloody yodelling.

  The Invaders always tried to hide their bad news (you still won’t find any of this in their histories) but even they couldn’t bury those corpses. How had we done it? How did we blind the satellites and their UAVs? Clearly it wasn’t staged to turn opinion against us, though they’d rather that was believed than the truth! And we had no mole in their high command, though they tortured dozens of their own people to be sure. No, no. Levello we had to thank for it. Levello gave us our secret weapon: Theo the Bug.

  Long thin fingers like a bug’s legs, poppy eyes like a bug’s eyes and speaking Bulgarian which sounded to me like a bug’s language, bless him – but none of that gave him his name, or not entirely, anyway. Theo the Bug had studied at the University of the Atlantic in St Donat’s when he and the world were young. I’ve no idea how Levello got hold of him. None of us even knew he existed. We were more concerned with Uzma when we set up the meeting, the first parliament, but there – I’ve run ahead again.

  December in the second year of the war and the resistance was but beat. No one would help us: too frightened. We were living like water rats in holts around Tregaron and Newcastle Emlyn. The holts were a piece of genius; the idea came from beavers and otters, it was a Canadian, MacInnis, who thought of it. A wonderful engineer he was. ‘Use the water!’ said MacInnis.

  ‘The drones can’t fly through it, the cameras can’t see through it – and it’s everywhere,’ as he said. He taught us to dig chambers in the river banks and reservoirs so that the entrance tunnels were below the lowest water level: easy in winter. We tunnelled up into the dry, or dryish, and that’s where we lived. If they found one the poor buggers inside wouldn’t know a thing about it: a bunker-buster and no survivors. And then there were their Special Forces, crawling about in culverts and burying themselves under bracken. They never surrendered, I’ll give them that. We caught six dug into a cemetery near Cefn Coed, up above Merthyr. It began as a great scrap but it set off terrible things, the worst of the war.

  The whole of Merthyr was a designated Insurgent Zone, along with Pontypridd and everything from Aberdare to Rhymney, all the way to the Vale of Neath. Those people! The greatest of the great: Ludo always said that if it wasn’t for the Invaders his writ would never have run to the Valleys, but once they arrived that was it. The Valley Boys and Valley Girls came over to us wholesale and the Invaders could barely buy one of them – they would rather take the wheels off APCs in the middle of Merthyr in broad daylight and flog them down the pub than claim a cent of traitor’s treasure. So the Invaders set up their observation posts on the flanks of hills above, aiming to catch fighters on their ways in or out, and anyone without a movement pass. They had drones circling over those valleys like clouds of rooks. We moved with great circumspection.

  One day we were over at Penderyn talking to the distillers there about making up a special whisky for delivery to the forts (we knew how much some of their officers liked a drink, and wouldn’t you, so far from home?) when this boy, Phil the Fly they called him, Lord knows why, comes panting in – not the fittest, he’d only come down from the pub – and says there’s a nest of Specials in the cemetery at Cefn Coed. Ludo decides we’ll get them because they liked to pretend their Specials were invulnerable, invisible, and we wanted to show them and the valley that such was not the case. So we arrange a funeral, a hearse with a coffin full of guns, mourners with flak jackets under their macs, the lot, and cloned movement passes for everyone of course, and at dusk two days later we go in.

  Three of the Specials were hit straight off. One died but the rest – including the wounded – fought. They called in their missiles and bombs, we closed with them and the dead were fairly jumping out of their graves in that cemetery, no exaggeration. Ludo had rocket teams waiting for the helicopters and when they came we got two. But all the excitement was too much for Merthyr. The Invaders had one garrison in the Castle Hotel in town, and another in Cyfarthfa Castle itself. (There wasn’t a castle in all of Wales without a detachment of the Liberation Army in residence by this time – don’t imagine we missed the irony.) Anyway, with no plan, no insiders and no whisper of plot beforehand, Merthyr rose against the Invaders. History will tell you about the first Merthyr Rising against the Ironmasters and the English ­– well, this was the second.

  They didn’t wait for us, either. They knew where our caches were so they broke them open and in they went. It should have been suicide. At Cyfarthfa it was, but they had better luck at the hotel. By the time the helicopters arrived to rescue the garrison that garrison were all dead and the boys had taken over the heavy weapons. The Invaders lost two more helicopters before they decided to settle for bombing the town to shards. Most people fled as soon as it kicked off, but it got worse two days later when they sent a column up from Cardiff to relieve the castle. That was how Merthyr was flattened. They never published casualty figures but anyone who had gone back died, as well as anyone who was still there.

  ‘What happened in Merthyr’ – you heard the phrase years after, like a curse that wouldn’t be lifted. And it wasn’t just Merthyr. The tanks shelled ‘insurgent strongholds’ all the way up the Taff. Ponty, Aberfan: it was reprisal and it changed the war. The tides of exhilaration at the Rising, then the anger and despair at the aftermath and the feeling that you couldn’t touch them without bringing down monsoons of d-uranium rain... it changed everything.

  ‘What can we do?’ people said. ‘They can hear our thoughts. No one can say anything; if the wind can catch it they hear it; if we rise they kill us all. What can we do?’

  Little Mari Evans from Bridgend was the first to answer. Seventeen years old. God knows where she got the stuff. Blue Mari they called her, she dyed her hair. She was the first. At the station, when troops were coming in and another regiment was rotating out. She picked her time perfectly, Blue Mari, and took twenty-six of them with her. There were two days of death-quiet then, while the Invaders crammed the sky with drones. So many! They were the only sound, like little tractors ploughing the clouds. They said you could walk in the rain and their wings would keep you dry. And then it seemed to take, like fire.

  Our people and our children blew themselves up, scattered themselves away like seeds on the care-nothing wind. We couldn’t bear it, for all that they killed our foes. Ludo put out an appeal for it to stop but it only seemed to make it worse. Like a plague on both your houses – another bomb, or three bombs, every day. The Invaders were terrified. Shot down scores of innocents in case they weren’t. And we felt we had nowhere to turn, then. How could we stop? We’d started it all – and there were those among us who thought nothing of slipping the suicides a pack of this or that: you just strap it on, so, and press here... The bomb k
ids didn’t seem to be able to stop: too much ecstasy and too much despair. So the only way to stop it was to win it, to drive the Invaders out. But how? How, in hell?

  We considered desperate things. Blow the power stations, some said. Let’s make a nuclear desert if that’s the only way to break their grip. Ludo wouldn’t have it: ‘They’ll be the masters of the desert,’ he said.

  ‘Poison the reservoirs?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘who’s to say when the waters clear that their flag won’t still be flying?’

  The solution he came up with was as grand and mad as he was then: ‘We’ll have to widen it,’ he said.

  ‘Fires from here to Vladi-bloody-vostok. Our enemy is a calculator. We force his calculations until he scats. We need to turn his face, like Napoleon or Hitler. Another Russia’s what we want! Another...’

  We thought of Uzma.

  Uzma! Difficult to separate the girl you were from the icon you became. You were a craze to them, to the screaming legions. Not so bad to begin with: it wasn’t your fault you made everyone jealous, all the time. But later, when your favour ennobled them and your mere name inspired crazy dreams – you near cleaved us in half. You certainly cleaved me.

  Going back, anyway. You were the only child of the ruling dynasty of the mightiest port of all – Karachi. We first heard of you before the war when Levello appeared one day, eyes widened by what he’d seen and had to say of you. You were marriageable age, famously beautiful and famously rejecting. Your dowry was half the subcontinent. Ludo now was the Bandit King of the West: just, acknowledged and revered. The Invaders were far away, still, wrapping up the remnants of the Americas and striking their infamous treaty with India. Africa was a plum in their maw, a continent transformed into an opencast mine, a stagger of dams and a million market gardens. Only Pakistan and Europe were still free.